February 16, 2009
Ants and Superorganisms
To pick a single paragraph of this New York Review of Books review of The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson as representative, would be impossible. If you have the time for a longish read — on ant societies, evolution, and the ways in which the pieces of a social order can mimic parts of a larger organism (among a dozen other things) — you won’t be disappointed.
Okay, I can’t help myself.
In explaining what a superorganism is, Hölldobler and Wilson draw up a useful set of “functional parallels” between an organism (such as ourselves) and the superorganism that is an ant colony. The individual ants, they say, function like cells in our body, an observation that’s given more piquancy when we realize that, like many of our cells, individual ants are extremely short-lived. Depending upon the species, between 1 and 10 percent of the entire worker population of a colony dies each day, and in some species nearly half of the ants that forage outside the nest die daily. The specialized ant castes—such as workers, soldiers, and queens—correspond, they say, to our organs; and the queen ant, which in some instances never moves, but which can lay twenty eggs every minute for all of her decade-long life, is the equivalent of our gonads.
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Oh, I want this book. Thanks, Deron.